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Canonical Pulls Kubuntu Personnel Funding
LinuxScribe writes "An announcement on the Kubuntu-devel mailing list tells the sad story: Canonical is pulling funding for in-house developers to work on the KDE-based Kubuntu flavor. Canonical now seems committed to its single vision of a GNOME-based Unity as a desktop and other Ubuntu flavors will now have to rely on community support and some infrastructure from Canonical."
Canonical have only pulled funding for one developer. Kubuntu, like all open source projects, will continue as long as there is a community behind it. It appears that Kubuntu hasn't been a commercial success for Canonical despite 7 years of funding. The KDE developer involved, Jonathan Riddell, deserves some respect for acknowledging this and recognising that this is a rational (and probably correct) business decision. I suspect quite a few developers would have reacted with anger at both being laid off and losing funding for their pet project.
Agreed.
While Ubuntu might have some issues that people are going to moan loudly about, remember, it's first job is to bring people into the Linux sphere, once they're accustomed to it, they can migrate out to other options if they feel they want to. Funding a parallel-but-different version is just encouraging the confusion. If there's one thing Linux suffers from in the eyes of the newcomer, it's too much choice, leading to confusion, subsequent frustration (with support) and returning to their hated-but-known Windows.
If we want cohesive desktop/apps then this is a reasonable move to make.
(I'm no fan of Ubuntu Unity, but I still use Ubuntu + Fluxbox instead :) )
While Ubuntu might have some issues that people are going to moan loudly about, remember, it's first job is to bring people into the Linux sphere...
I assure you that for most people, being brought into Gnome is just going to send them right back to Windows.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
Me too. I think the Kubuntu developers did some great work pushing the envelope on what KDE can do on the desktop and netbook, and a lot of their work has appeared upstream. Kudos to Jonathan Riddell and the other Kubuntu devs! Personally, though, I needed stability more than shiny new features so I switched to Debian (ironically) unstable. Not only does it offer a more stable desktop experience with KDE 4.6 than does Kubuntu, but because its a rolling release distribution the packages are usually fresher than the latest Ubuntu release and I haven't had to reinstall in over a year. Hopefully now we will have more manpower to work on stable, vanilla KDE 4.7 and 4.8 on Debian.
As for Ubuntu, I now have zero reasons to install it.
Me too. I think the Kubuntu developers did some great work pushing the envelope on what KDE can do on the desktop and netbook, and a lot of their work has appeared upstream. Kudos to Jonathan Riddell and the other Kubuntu devs! Personally, though, I needed stability more than shiny new features so I switched to Debian (ironically) unstable. Not only does it offer a more stable desktop experience with KDE 4.6 than does Kubuntu, but because its a rolling release distribution the packages are usually fresher than the latest Ubuntu release and I haven't had to reinstall in over a year. Hopefully now we will have more manpower to work on stable, vanilla KDE 4.7 and 4.8 on Debian.
As for Ubuntu, I now have zero reasons to install it.
You may have zero reasons to install, but it made a great deal of sense to many people I would point at a distro. Yes, KDE 4 is craploads better than Gnome [23]. Really.
However, as much as I love debian, I am not pointing raw users at a distro that expects the users to be able to deal with massive breakage when certain libs and so on are updated, and yes, that shit happens all the time in unstable. Hence the name. So now I have to point them at ubuntu, maybe suggest they install kubuntu-desktop and hope it isn't broken now, or just leave them with Unity.
Either way, debian unstable does not want a crapload of kubuntu refugees, trust me, no one will enjoy that.
If you're comfortable with Debian, just go for straight Debian. A nice stable outfit who does a good job of respecting the user's time.
If regular Debian is a bit hard, like it was for noobie me, then Linux Mint Debian (lmde, different from Linux Mint Ubuntu) is a great alternative. So far, nobody trying to shove idiotic UIs down my throat that might be the bees knees on smartphones, but I'm using a core i7 with a big screen, thank you very much.
(About that, by the way. These aren't stone adzes or something. We're talking about computers with plenty of memory. Why aren't there several UIs the user can choose from, based on what works for their platform? I mean, really. Why not? I gather that's what KDE is aiming for, but they need to hurry up and get there. They seem to be our only advanced GUI hope right now.)